Introduction
The year is 1852, and a boy has been born to a doctor and his wife in the rural Spanish town of Petilla de Aragón. His name is Santiago Ramón y Cajal. He is a precocious and curious child with a love of the natural world, and before he reaches a decade old, his skills in illustration blossom (1).
Cajal is an artist, through and through. But by the end of his 82 years of life, he would be remembered as one of the most influential scientists of all time.
Arbor VItae is an exploration of Santiago Ramón y Cajal's contributions to Art, Science, anD the brain as we understand it today.
Cajal as artist
"I was about eight or nine years old, when I had an uncontrollable mania for staining papers, drawing scribbles in books and smearing the recently plastered walls, doors and facades of the town, with all kinds of scribbles, war scenes and bullfighting incidents." (1)
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'Mania' for art Cajal did have. His autobiography frequently returns to his incessant need to draw and paint, despite disapproval from family and teachers. Twice in this passage does Cajal use the word 'scribbles,' pointing toward a newly developed skill and feverish compulsion driving his actions. He points out that his early drawings were 'war scenes and bullfighting incidents,' fantastical images the young Cajal had never seen. From a young age, his imagination and creativity ran wild.
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The image on the right shows a sketch from a 10 year old Cajal, depicting his memory of a farmer drinking in a tavern, included in his autobiography. (1)
Cajal as Physician
"It was necessary to change the magical brush, creator of life, for the cruel scalpel, which circumvents death; the painter's touch, which looks like a king's scepter, for the village doctor's gnarled cane!" (1)
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Cajal's writing from the perspective of his young self truly highlights his disdain for having to give up medicine. Pressured by his father, a doctor himself, and the Spanish economy at the time, Cajal studied medicine instead. His words 'cruel scalpel,' with a negative connotation, are juxtaposed by 'circumvents death.' To Cajal, his medical career was not chosen out of his desire to save lives. Medicine was a punishment that drove him away from art. His words equate doctors closer to 'gnarled' witches than highly revered 'kings.' Resentment toward seemed to be growing within him.
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The image to the right shows a portrait of Cajal's father, Justo Ramón Casasús, who pressured Cajal to go into medicine. This image is included in his bibliography (1).
Cajal as Medical Student
"Studying the bones on paper, that is, theoretically, would have been a didactic crime, of which my [father] was incapable. He knew very well that nature can only be understood by direct contemplation, without human veils... [Others] read in books instead of reading in things; they tried to retain without trying to assimilate and reason." (1)
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Cajal's medical education began under his father, an expert in anatomy and human dissection. In his autobiography he reports that he and his father acquired their specimens through unethical and illegal body snatching expeditions in their town's graveyard, as was common at the time (2). Through this passage, more can be learned about Cajal's approach toward knowledge and learning. He believed that anatomy could not be learned from studying a book, in which facts are interpreted through a fallible 'human veil.' One must instead 'assimilate and reason' about the body through actual interaction with the body.
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The image to the right shows a portrait of Cajal at age 20 as a medical student, included in his autobiography (1).
Cajal as Patient
"They found me yellow, emaciated, with a painful appearance that was sad... I did not recover my former strength nor was I able to completely shake off the malarial anemia... Improved, therefore, as much as possible, we had to think about the future. I had to rebuild my life, diverting it back to the old channel."
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Following his graduation from Zaragoza Medical School, Cajal served as a medical officer in the Spanish army. While stationed in Cuba, he contracted malaria with recurring fevers and that proved to be resistant to quinine, the best available treatment at the time (3). Cajal's autobiography develops into a pathography, in which he wrestles with the chronicity of his illness, the refusal of his higher ups to discharge him from service, and his desire to return to a time in which he was not ill. He discusses the need to 'rebuild' his life, as though malaria has destroyed it. But it was this illness that changed the course of his life and set him on the path to produce science's most famous pieces of art. Because he was too chronically ill to practice medicine, he instead went into academia and research, ultimately producing the images he is known for today.
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The image to the right shows a portrait of Cajal in the army, sick with malaria at the time. This image is included in his autobiography (1).
Why Study Cajal?
For a few reasons.
01
Un-Art History
The evolution of anatomical drawings over time has been studied ad nauseam (16, 17). Up to and through the Renaissance, anatomical drawings were closer to classical pieces of art than scientific drawings. However, Andreas Vesalius' work on the human body signified a shift away from fusion and art and science (18). While Vesalius' work was certainly inspired by the arts, with its picturesque backgrounds and posed subjects, it sparked a shift toward depicting anatomy solely as science.
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The field of art history certainly hasn't made anatomical illustrations a focus of their studies, and especially not histological illustrations (15). Art historian James Elkins argues that analyzing scientific imagery is the next step art history as a field should take, as he writes, "Instead of confining nonart images to the sciences, or opposing 'fine art' to 'scientific images,' we should understand visual elements in science as an efflorescence of informational images in general" (15).
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Thus, it becomes necessary to study Cajal as an artist in scientific history. His work provides insight into the fusion of science and art that made the images so famous.
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The image to the right is by Andreas Vesalius and is from (16).
02
Changing Times, Changing Tech
In his autobiography, Cajal recalls being mystified by the arrival of the newly invented railroad to Spain and his later encounter with a camera (1). He lived through a time of massive political, social, and scientific change, beginning with the Spanish Glorious Revolution and ending with World War I.
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Examining Cajal's illustrations, knowing that he lived through a certain time period with technological developments, can illuminate how technology impacts scientific data. Although Cajal had a photography hobby, photographic and microscopic technology were too rudimentary to be used to capture histological slides (1). This constraint was likely key to Cajal's reproductions of his slides. Geoffrey Belknap, a science and photography historian notes that "compelling imagery was becoming a competitive factor in the burgeoning marketplace of ideas" (19). Cajal, likely knowing this, must have used unique and exciting imagery to make his scientific arguments.
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At the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, Cajal and other scientists were on the cusp of revolutions in scientific imagery. He was among the last researchers to utilize illustration as the primary means of communicating evidence. Thus, examining Cajal's work gives insight into science as it went through a major turning point.
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To the right is a photograph taken by Cajal of his childhood home (1).
03
Science Across the Centuries
Cajal began his training in science and medicine in the late 19th century, ended his career only upon his death in the 20th century, and continues to impact 21st century science. Cajal's work is therefore a lens into revolutionary research done more than a century ago, and it allows for comparisons to be drawn between it and modern day science.
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During the 19th century, popular science books exploded in popularity with help from increasing literacy, improved rate of education, and advances in book illustration technology (18). Images flourished, and the way they were used in science began to change. They were used not only as simple visual aids to the text alongside them, but also helped to represent abstract ideas and contribute to the conclusion being presented.
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The way that imagery is created and used in science has changed over time. As Moser and Gamble write, "The iconographic dimension of scientific illustration plays a role in the maintenance of ideas over time" (18). Illustrations like Cajal's can contribute as much to scientific history as the paper it was published in and is worth examining further.
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The image to the right is Cajal's illustration of the Calyx of Held and is from (7).
